Galaxy NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,297 words · ~11 min read
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welcome to a very exciting unboxing the new single GPU graphics card King is
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here this is the GeForce GTX 680 from
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Galaxy it's got a three-year warranty 2 gigs of gddr5 memory at 6
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GHz uh features direct X11 as have the
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last couple of generations of GeForce graphics cards SLI fizx and 3D Vision
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something that is not mentioned on the box though that it also supports is
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NVIDIA surround in 3D Vision off of a
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single card so uh NVIDIA has added that
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functionality to their card you can hook up up to four displays in three gaming
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plus one auxiliary and you can have 3D division
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running at the same time off a single card so hold on let's see if there's
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anything going on here ah yes key features NVIDIA GPU boost more on that
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in a moment adaptive vertical syn is cool because what it allows you to do is
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turn on NVIDIA's adaptive vertical SN so vsync as you guys may or may not know
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will prevent tearing so that is those artifacts that look like you got half of
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one frame and half of another frame sort of slightly offset as you turn in game
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or or move around in game so vsync prevents that but also locks your frame
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rate at 60 FPS and it can cause some uh
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you know Mouse leg and stuff like that so adaptive vsync turns vsync on to
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prevent tearing and then off when your frame rate is below
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60 so what that means is that when you're below 60 what can happen a lot of
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the time is you'll be locked into a frame rate that is a multiple of 60 like
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30 or 20 or 15 instead of running at you
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know 42 or 25 so you'll be able to
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squeeze the most performance out of your card when it's not running at 60 FPS but
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be locked at 60 when it is capable of it
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in order to prevent tearing so that's kind of a neat feature man that was
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really tight in there okay let's keep going here NVIDIA surround which I
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mentioned already four concurrent displays including two dual link DVI
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HDMI and DisplayPort 1.2 this card also
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includes support for 4K displays so that
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is super high resolution displays direct X11 with direct compute 5.0 fiz X yes
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cool 3D Vision SLI Cuda PCI Express 3.0
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this is the first PCI Express 3.0
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graphics card from NVIDIA's
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Partners it's suggesting a minimum of 550 W power supply but what you guys are
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going to find out about this when I do my review on it which is probably going
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to go up around the same time as this unboxing is that the power consumption
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is actually phenomenal for a high-end
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card so thank you for purchasing something something set up easy quick steps for quick installation guide and
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whatnot okay cool and then we've got the
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card itself so let's hold on let's see what galaxy includes in terms of
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accessories and then we'll start talking about some of the additional technology
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points that I want to cover about this graphics card here we go if I can figure
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out how this comes apart ah very nice okay so we have a DVI to VGA
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adapter we have two Molex to single PCIe
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6 pin two Molex to single PCI six pin
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that's funny guys high-end graphics card two six pin adapters we'll more on that
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in a moment uh graphics card driver installation disc download the latest as
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well as a user manual okay so fairly straightforward accessory package
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here nice packaging overall though looks
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good very black all right now the card
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okay now in terms of its physical appearance it's a very similar looking
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to a GTX 580 in terms of its size in
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terms of the the cooler although there are some subtle differences but let's
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have a look at the overall physical aspects of the card first so we've got two SLI connectors meaning this card
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does support three-way or four-way SLI there's our little Galaxy sticker it's
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got a green GeForce GTX thing going on unlike the GTX 590 it doesn't look like
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it lights up or anything but it does look pretty sharp I'll give them that
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this is cool check this out two six pin
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PCIe connectors also what NVIDIA's done
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by putting the two six pin PCIe connectors in the same place is they've
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bought themselves some extra room on the PCB to do other things you can see
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actually oh look at this looks like it'll be up to uh it'll
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be up to oh that's bizarre it looks like either they changed their mind at some
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point between having a six and an eight pin and then they did like two six pins
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but then looks like you could either put them here and here or here and here
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maybe it's up to the board Partners at some point in the future to decide how
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they want to implement it but there you go this is the OEM One and NVIDIA says
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that bought them some room for additional PCB components versus doing
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it the other way it should also be fairly tidy to Cable manage this way because you can either come up in one
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column or down in one column from a cable management hole so that's very
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very cool we've got the usual NVIDIA blower style fan that we find on most
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OEM cards with Galaxy's graph on the Shroud itself on the back of the
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card we find not a whole lot we find the PCB is Right flush with the cooler this
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is something that's very confusing to me about AMD cards and that is uh why AMD
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insists on continuing to do this where they have the PCB ending here and then
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they just have an additional like random bunch of plastic that makes the card
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unnecessarily up to a centimeter longer than it actually is I ran into trouble
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installing that 7970 into a shuttle xpc
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barebone the other day because of that extra overhang there so NVIDIA does not
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do that here's our PCI Express 3.0 16x
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slot so that's capable of up to two times the bandwidth of a PCI Express 2.0
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16x slot on the back we find a bunch of other components and whatnots so you can
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see where the RAM chips are installed all on the other side there's no shroud
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on the back of this card so you can see
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the bare components you can see the GPU is right under there and then on the
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back we find the io so there's our two dual link DVI uh this guy is a dvii this
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is a DVI D so the difference is that this one supports analog output we've
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got HDMI as well as DisplayPort 1.2 and
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then we've got a little vent here and a bigger vent here and this is kind of cool check this out so you guys see how
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far away the cooling fins are in there can you see that really um the actual
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fins cooling the GPU I guess that's kind of tough isn't it okay I'll try and get
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you guys a better angle okay can you see in there how they're angled they're
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swept back like that yeah excellent okay so NVIDIA's done
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that for a very specific reason it gives some Dead Space Between the actual fins
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of the GPU heat sink and the Shroud at
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the back so this is much like using a spacer on a radiator in order to
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eliminate uh any kind of dead zones and as well as to more evenly push out the
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air so so you give the air a little bit of room to to accumulate and then come
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out evenly so I'm not describing this in the best possible terms honestly it's
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late and I'm tired but but the point is that it you are able to exhaust air more
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efficiently with less resistance from the see the the metal pieces in the
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Shroud and it's generally better some of
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the air is going to come out into your case so there's a gap here there's a gap
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here but most of the exhaust from this blower design is going to go out the
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back of the case so if you do have a case that doesn't have great ventilation
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this is usually a better choice than going with uh the more typical
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aftermarket designs that you see such as
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uh ah these kinds of dual fan implementations that blow all the air
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into the case all right moving on here
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so what else what else we got here ah GPU boost so this card has 195 wat TDP
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so that is thermal design power and what that means is that the clock speed
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whenever you're designing a graphics card you want a particular thermal
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envelope that you have to meet that the reason is a for power delivery you have
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to make sure that it's going to be within spec and B for heat dissipation
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so you can only dissipate so much heat with your reference cooler you don't
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want the uh the actual GPU to start uh
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producing more heat than you can dissipate because then you're going to run into trouble okay so what that means
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is that when you design a graphics card you go okay I can apply this much voltage I can apply this much clock
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speed and it stays within this TDP now NVIDIA took a bit of an Innovative
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solution that uh may or may not have been inspired by something like Intel's
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uh turbo boost and that is they allow
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their GPU to turn its clock speed up in
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less demanding games and applications to achieve overclocked
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settings on its own so their GPU boost
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technology is capable of taking the 1,06 MHz clock speed up to five
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typically 5% or as much as 10% above
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that stock clock speed as long as it stays within the thermal design
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specification so that's one really cool feature GPU boost okay FXAA has been
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added to the NVIDIA control panel so this is a faster form of anti-aliasing
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and you can now force it on in games even the ones that don't support it so
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that's a really neat thing as well we already talked about adaptive vsync txaa
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modes 1 and two so NVIDIA claims and I'm going to be hopefully taking a look at
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this in the future that mode one is about equivalent to a times AA with the
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performance hit of only two times anti-aliasing and mode two provides
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significantly better image quality than mode one with only the performance hit
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of four times um multi- sampling anti-aliasing so the more traditional
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kind so that's really neat as well we've covered 3.1 3+1 displays 4K monitors
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support better physics performance uh nvnc so video encoding Hardware can run
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faster than the Cuda based Solutions in the past and can also run concurrently
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with the Cuda course on the graphics card so you can allow the Cuda course to
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handle pre-processing while the nvnc so
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nvn I guess that's short for encoder uh can handle the encoding the three heat
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pipe dual slot fan I guess we can't really see that but the way this works
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is instead of using a vapor chamber like we've seen with a couple previous uh
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generation graphics cards from both sides uh which is just like a big long
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kind of like a big Square very flat heat
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pipe it uses three heat pipes one in an S shape and then two in C shapes coming
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out from the GPU to keep things nice and flat to evenly distribute heat to the
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aluminum fins inside finally it has 1,532 Kuda cores it
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clocked at oh I mentioned this sort of briefly but it's clocked at just over 1
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GHz stock speed although it'll boost up from there as well as 6 GHz on the
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memory and finally another cool thing
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about GPU boost is that it will actually scale with overclocking on the card so
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you can overclock your stock speed and your GPU boost will actually scale up
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from there as well and while I haven't tested it yet I'm really hoping to to
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see some interesting overclocking results with this particular GPU so
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NVIDIA claims two times the performance per watt of the two generations ago
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Flagship GTX 480 meaning we've got significantly better performance at uh
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what is apparently with based on the 195 wat TDP significantly better power
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consumption so that means us SLI users out there are in for a treat because
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your power bill is about to go down when you upgrade to a couple of these puppies
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so I think that pretty much much covers it thank you for checking out my
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unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 680 from Galaxy and don't forget to
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